Book Review: You

Summary

From debut author Caroline Kepnes comes You, one of Suspense Magazine’s Best Books of 2014, and a brilliant and terrifying novel for the social media age.

When a beautiful, aspiring writer strides into the East Village bookstore where Joe Goldberg works, he does what anyone would do: he Googles the name on her credit card.

There is only one Guinevere Beck in New York City. She has a public Facebook account and Tweets incessantly, telling Joe everything he needs to know: she is simply Beck to her friends, she went to Brown University, she lives on Bank Street, and she’ll be at a bar in Brooklyn tonight—the perfect place for a “chance” meeting.

As Joe invisibly and obsessively takes control of Beck’s life, he orchestrates a series of events to ensure Beck finds herself in his waiting arms. Moving from stalker to boyfriend, Joe transforms himself into Beck’s perfect man, all while quietly removing the obstacles that stand in their way—even if it means murder.

A terrifying exploration of how vulnerable we all are to stalking and manipulation, debut author Caroline Kepnes delivers a razor-sharp novel for our hyper-connected digital age. You is a compulsively readable page-turner that’s being compared to Gone Girl, American Psycho, and Stephen King’s Misery.

My review

5/5

So, wow, this is different from anything I’ve read before. This is definitely a 5-star read just for the pure creepiness of it. Our protagonist, or should I say antagonist, because as it turns out, he is a very unreliable narrator, is a worker at bookstore named Joe. He becomes manically obsessed with a girl named Guinevere Beck. He begins to take control of her life like an invisible puppeteer and eventually through pure manipulative, he becomes her boyfriend. Things move fast and Beck is quick to learn the truth of her new love.

Suspenseful and page turning, I found this was impossible to put down. Told from the perspective of the stalker made the story both engaging and different from other books in the same market. Definitely recommended to those who enjoyed books by Stephen King and Gillian Flynn.

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Published by Author Kayla Krantz

Proud author responsible for Dead by Morning and The Council, fascinated by the dark and macabre. Stephen King is her all time inspiration mixed in with a little bit of Eminem and some faint remnants of the works of Edgar Allen Poe. When she began writing, she started in horror but it somehow drifted into thriller. She loves the 1988 movie Heathers. She was born and raised in Michigan but traveled across the country to where she currently resides in Texas.
View all posts by Author Kayla Krantz